Sir Keir Starmer
By Chris Norris
Oh yes, we’ve known your type, Sir Keir,
We’ve known your type before,
Plain-dealing, thoughtful, mild, sincere –
Bank-manager types, so they’d appear –
Yet when it comes to war
Just let those bureaucrats get near
The reins of power and then it’s clear
That no warmonger’s more
At home in that infernal sphere,
No quisling readier to steer
Death-dealing arms galore
To any power-crazed bombardier
Who twists his arm or bends his ear,
And none who’d hold in awe
The war-god of long-past Judea
Called on when Friday eve is near
And all the family draw
Around for Sabbat, wait to hear
The prayer that keeps his conscience clear,
And let no final straw,
Like piles of corpses, interfere
With his next thought: the killing-gear,
And how to get the law
Made tougher still and so strike fear
Into the hearts of those who’d jeer
At you, Sir Keir, and your
Once half-way decent law career
Now prostituted to the sheer
Barbarity that saw
Mass-murder given the all-clear
By a dead soul whose closest peer
Was Adolf Eichmann, or
That kindred paragon of mere
Efficiency who’d need to veer
No further than from drawer
To drawer if he’d now commandeer
The role of Moloch’s loyal wazir
And open wide the door
Of oven, bomb-hatch, or frontier
Twixt life and death as if to sneer
At solemn oaths you swore
When conscience-calls once had your ear,
No Trump required you lick their rear,
And Arms-for-Israel Corps
Had not yet seen you volunteer
As Death-Exporter of the Year,
Fresh genocides in store.
